“Sure about what?”
“About, I don’t know, everything.”
Aldo, who had made a career out of wondering with only minimal promise of certainty, shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad.”
“Sorry, I know, I—” Masso scraped a hand over his cheeks. “I don’t know myself.”
“Well, try,” Aldo suggested. “You’re better at words than I am.”
Masso’s mouth quirked, shaking his head. “I worry about you, Rinaldo.”
“You always worry about me. I keep telling you, you don’t have to.”
“Yes but I’m … a different kind of worried now.”
Aldo tucked one hand into his trouser pocket. He understood the concept of change, of variables. There was an obvious, unmissable distinction between then and now.
“I thought you liked her,” he said quietly, and Masso nodded.
“I do like her. I like her a lot, she’s brilliant.”
“But?”
“She’s,” Masso began, and stopped, turning to look squarely at Aldo. “She’s too fast for you.”
Evidently sex in the bathroom wasn’t a great idea, which he might have guessed. “Dad, this isn’t the fifties—”
“No, I don’t mean—not like that.” Masso grimaced. “Her mind, her nature, what she is. She’s, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She’s moving faster than you are.”
“But you said I’d finally found someone who could keep up with me.”
“Yes, I know, and in many ways she is, but also she’s moving too fast for you. I’m worried,” Masso exhaled with reluctance; with reticence, as if he didn’t want to be the one to have to pass on the message but hey, look around, there was no one else. “I worry that if you try to keep up with her, you’ll burn out, Rinaldo.”
“I don’t understand.”
Aldo’s pulse now seemed too fast, his mouth too dry, and Masso turned to face him.
“Rinaldo, we both know you’re not like everyone else,” Masso said softly. “We don’t talk about it often, but we know, don’t we? That you’re, I don’t know. More fragile,” he said, wincing slightly, and Aldo felt suddenly stiff, like his bones would splinter if he moved. “You need stability. You need someone reliable, predictable. Regan, she’s impulsive.”
Yes, Dad, I know. If she were any less impulsive, she wouldn’t be with me and I would have never known what she was, or how it felt to hold her. I would never have known what it was to matter for once; for the first time, and for the only time that I have ever known.
“Maybe I need impulsive,” Aldo said.
Masso shook his head. “Not this kind of impulsive.”
“You can’t know that.”
“No, maybe I don’t, maybe you’re right.” Masso’s voice was grim. “I only know that I loved a woman once like her, who saw the world as she does: like a flame she can’t hold between her fingers. I only know that a woman like that isn’t afraid to burn, that she will drag you in with her, and I know she will come out laughing and you will not. I only know that I don’t know what I’ll do, Rinaldo, if something hurts you—”
“Dad, that’s … You can’t be serious.”
But Masso was always serious. “Will she settle down, Rinaldo?” he pressed. “Will she want a life, a family, stability, what?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I can’t possibly know that.”
“Yes, but someone has to know for you, someone has to ask you.” He gripped Aldo’s arm, tugging him into a more secluded corner. “Where are we in time, Rinaldo?”
“I—” He felt briefly dizzied. “Dad, I thought—”
“We are in the now, Aldo.” His father was unusually insistent. “Look around, orient yourself. You’re a grown man, she’s a grown woman, and you have to protect yourself because she will not protect you. She’s smart, she’s beautiful, she’s talented, yes. She’s intuitive and kind, wonderful. So was your mother, and Regan is restless like her. I can see it in the way she moves, the way she looks at you, it’s very familiar.”
Immediately, Aldo’s brain began rationalizing, compartmentalizing, placing things in boxes of like and unlike. “Regan isn’t Mom.”
“Of course not, no two people are the same. But I remember what it was to feel everything all at once, and I have to tell you,” Masso said urgently, “I never pieced myself back together. And now, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can watch you do the same.”